EUTOPIA

Louise Lawler

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Louise Lawler
Why Pictures Now [link]  (through July 30th, 2017)
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Thirty years after her first show at MoMA, Louise Lawler continues to challenge the notions of authenticity, authorship and judgement by revealing the mechanics of art and its reception. The strategies of multiplication using mass culture, titling, cropping and reframing are still present, however in “Why Pictures Now” the show’s title not only serves as a supplemental mirror image of art in the age of digital production, in referencing an earlier work it acts as -or enacts- an inside out installation effectively producing a reversal where the viewer in her contingent role as co-author retraces and reframes the work.

~ Ali Soltani
images courtesy of MOMA and Soltani+LeClercq

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Maria Hassabi

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maria hassabi MoMA

Maria Hassabi “Plastic” at Museum of Modern Art, New York

Maria Hassabi
Plastic
The Museum of Modern Art, New York [link]
February 21-March 20, 2016 // video [link]

Exploring the body in almost imperceptible action, choreographer Maria Hassabi’s dancers performed daily for one month on the 2nd floor stairwell and atrium. Hassabi intends to remove the theatrical barriers between subject and object, but I question the actuality of such a missive, since the museum is already an artificial construct of stage and audience. The day I visited was the dancers “day off”, so in the spirit of re-performance, I had my friends re-enact the works on the stairwell, to test whether visitors would stop to gawk or simply step over their bodies as they traversed the stairwell. Performance aborted after the vigilant guards noticed our intervention.

~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of MoMA and the artist

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Andrés Jaque

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150620 A Jaque Cosmo PS1 002

Andres Jaque, “Cosmo” image: Miguel de Guzmán. Imagen Subliminal

Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation
COSMO
Young Architects Program
Museum of Modern Art PS1, New York [link]

Galilean orbital irrigation structures are linked to diagrammatic catenary arcs: a cat’s cradle mapping water passage to suspended planetary-plants rising from mobile platforms. Part sci-fi rave aesthetic, part applied –if arcane— ecological science, the device purifies New York’s increasingly toxic water supply under the guise of a futuristic urban, social garden.

Utilizing locally sourced components and plants (to be returned) COSMO exposes previously hidden industrial domains as potentially manageable, vibrant and locally viable systems. Enmeshed within an art-party glamour the glowing, lollipop seduction verifies that ecosystemic infrastructure, when properly manifested, can also serve as a social aggregator and communal purifier.

~ Ryder Richards
images credit: Miguel de Guzmán. Imagen Subliminal

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